Spending the day (and most of yesterday) tucked up
recovering from a nasty stomach bug I think I picked up in
Barcelona. Everything is fine until I eat something, at
which point it all gets a bit hairy. Still, I could stand
to lose a few pounds. And it gives me the opportunity to
catch up one some e-mail.

Spent part of last week at the NordU2001 conference.
BSDi were a sponsor, which meant that we got to do a
presentation. Figuring that most people wouldn't want to
sit through a standard vendor presentation, I gave an
introduction to DocBook, where it fits among the sea of
documentation formats already available, and
what its benefits are compared to those formats. It seemed
to go down well, and I'm exchanging e-mail with some of the
people who attended to help them up the learning curve.

The documentation infrastructure on FreeBSD has taken
another leap forward -- inline images are now supported,
without requiring the end user to pull down all of
ImageMagick (and its dependencies). The author can write
something like this

<textobject>
<para>A box with an 'A' in it</para>
</textobject>
</mediaobject>

and the Makefile's and stylesheets automatically handle
converting the image from its source format (EPS or PNG) to
the correct format for the output (EPS, PNG, or PDF),
scaling the image correctly as necessary, and so on. It's
also possible to build plain text versions of the
documentation, without any images -- in this case, the first
textobject, with the ASCII art, will be used. This is
pretty useful.

With this done I could bring in something else that's
been sat in my tree for a while. Addison Wesley have very
kindly allowed us to excerpt chapter 2 of the book "The
Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System"
for the FreeBSD Documentation Project. This contains a
couple of images, and it's been the image support that's
been holding it back.

Spent some time reordering
http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html, which I'll commit later.
Hopefully it makes the information clearer.

Going back and forth with Adam di Carlo in the
docbook-apps mailing list. Looks like we might have the
beginnings of commonality between the FreeBSD doc.
infrastructure and that of (some) Linux (distributions).
Which is good.

An interesting week. First off, there's been all the stuff
for BSDi in EMEASA that's going very nicely. Naturally, I
can't talk about that, so I'll skip it.

In my CFT I've been playing with a new toy, a Sony Vaio
PCG-F709. This little beast is a 750MHz PIII with 128MB of
RAM and an 18GB hard disk. Somewhat overspecced for the
stuff that I have to run, but it's the stuff that's
interesting to run that's important.

In particular, I've decided to drag myself out of the X11
darkages and see what the current state of the art Unix
desktop environment is, and whether or not all the fuss over
GNOME and KDE is really warranted. Anecdotal evidence
suggested that equipping myself with a powerful machine
would be a good thing to do before tackling this. My main
desktop is a 200MHz PII, and it's been struggling somewhat
recently.

Now, my idea of a usable desktop is CTWM with a few virtual
desktops (bound to F1 -> F5), a couple of copies of xbuffy,
an xload, and some custom menu bindings to throw up some
shells on different hosts. Oh, and a few keybindings -- to
wit, ALT+Mouse 1 should raise/lower, ALT+Mouse 2 should
resize, and ALT+Mouse 3 should move the window. Those have
been in my window manager environment for years, and are
ingrained in my fingers. If that doesn't work on any new
system then I don't want to know.

Right now I'm experimenting with Gnome.

# cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome# make install

is easy enough to do, even if it does take an age and then
some to download and build. I've been playing around with
this for about 48 hours now, and I'm not entirely sure I
appreciate the point. Yes, the integration between all the
bits and pieces is nice, but this whole concept of dropping
icons and
programs on to the desktop is still somewhat alien. I've
been fighting it on Windows for years, and don't really want
to return to it on a Unix system. When you spend 95% of
your time in a CLI anyway, it's much less arduous to "cd
~/docs; xemacs" than it is to pick up the mouse, click on
the foot, and point and fumble until you hit the correct
icon. Which means that as soon as I work out how to get all
those annoying copies of gmc gone they're going to be gone.

Also (and something I've never seen adequately discussed
anywhere) when you've got umpteen different applications all
running, with various windows all over the screen, it's
impossible to see anything on the desktop anyway. Which
makes moving windows out of the way in order to be able to
doubleclick an icon incredibly tedious. "Just say no to
icons on the desktop."

Sawfish seems quite nice, with the default theme being
eminently usable on the laptop. I miss my list of hosts
that used to pop up on the right mouse button however. A
few minutes digging hasn't shown how to create user-defined
menus to overide the one it insists on showing, so that will
have to be a task for another day. But 10 out of 10 for
making it easy for me to bring my favourite key bindings
over. Lisp-ish languages aren't my preferred choice, but
diddling ~/.sawfish/custom was relatively painless, and
certainly no more traumatic than the same changes for
.ctwmrc.

The jury's still out on the panel. I never got on with CDE
when I was using Solaris, and this doesn't inspire me with
confidence. I'm not sure I want to give up the bottom 48
lines of precious real estate for information that could be
stratigically scattered around the screen. I can't see a
way to only partially extend it either, so I can claw back
some of my screen. Of course, this isn't helped by
gnome-help-browser crashing at every available opportunity.

Still, responses remain snappy. Then again, at 750MHz I'd
damn well expect them to. I suspect that running this
little lot on the P200 is going to be an interesting
exercise in patience, not least while the stuff builds. X
plus the Gnome components seems to be taking the better part
of 32MB of resident memory at the moment, which strikes me
as being a little on the heavy side. jade(1)'s reaction
when I try to run it some large documents (megabyte+) should
be interesting.

Overall, nice try. As a desktop it doesn't feel egregiously
bad, and I suspect some of the smaller utilities (in
particular the calendar and contact information stuff, if
the Palm synching works properly) will prove very useful.
But the requirement to pull in all the additional libraries
for Gnome is onerous, and I'm still undecided whether it's
going to be worth the effort.

Meanwhile, in another window, a KDE snapshot from late July
is building itself. It'll be interesting to see how the two
compare -- particularly as I'm unlikely to be developing
under either of them any time soon, so the vaunted C/C++
differences between them doesn't really bother me.

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